Jun 25, 2013 - Judging by the vicious — and irrelevant — attacks on Snowden's ... website visits and financial transactions that the agency is also amassing, that ... The debate over the content of Edward Snowden's character is a sideshow.

6 days ago - US spying revelations raise fears over European co-operation ... which transits globally via a Belgium-based co-operative, with US spy agencies. ...Edward Snowden that American intelligence agencies have been tapping data ... access to bank data from Swift, the Brussels-based co-operative that handles ...

(Reuters) - America's National Security Agency works closely with
Germany and other Western states on a 'no questions asked'-basis, former
NSA employee Edward Snowden said in comments that undermine Chancellor
Angela Merkel's indignant talk of "Cold War" tactics."They are in bed with the
Germans, just like with most other Western states," German magazine Der
Spiegel quotes him as saying in an interview published on Sunday that
was carried out before he fled to Hong Kong in May and divulged details
of extensive secret U.S. surveillance.

"Other
agencies don't ask us where we got the information from and we don't
ask them. That way they can protect their top politicians from the
backlash in case it emerges how massively people's privacy is abused
worldwide," he said.His comments
about cooperation with governments overseas, which he said were led by
the NSA's Foreign Affairs Directorate, appear to contradict the German
government's show of surprise at the scale of the U.S. electronic
snooping.Germany has demanded
explanations for Snowden's allegations of large-scale spying by the NSA,
and by Britain via a programme codenamed 'Tempora', on their allies
including Germany and other European Union states, as well as EU
institutions and embassies.Chancellor
Angela Merkel pointed out during President Barack Obama's recent visit
that Germany had avoided terrorist attacks thanks to information from
allies. But she says there must be limits to the intrusion on privacy
and wants this discussed next week in parallel with the start of EU-U.S.
free trade talks.Berlin has
alluded repeatedly to "Cold War" tactics - Merkel used the term again on
Saturday at a political rally - and has said spying on friends is
unacceptable. Her spokesman has said a transatlantic trade deal requires
a level of "mutual trust".ELECTION ISSUEThe
domestic intelligence chief has said he knew nothing of such widespread
surveillance by the NSA. But German opposition parties - with an eye on
September's federal election - insist that somebody in Merkel's office,
where the German intelligence agencies are coordinated, must have known
what was going on.The government
did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Der Spiegel
report, which follows a report last week in French daily Le Monde saying
France also had an extensive surveillance programme.Der
Spiegel has reported that on an average day, the NSA monitored about 20
million German phone connections and 10 million internet data sets,
rising to 60 million phone connections on busy days.Germans
are particularly sensitive about eavesdropping because of the intrusive
surveillance in the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR) and
during the Nazi era.Snowden, a
U.S. citizen, fled in May a few weeks before the details he provided
about the NSA were published and is believed to have been holed up in
Moscow airport since June 23.Bolivia
offered asylum on Saturday to Snowden, joining leftist allies Venezuela
and Nicaragua in defiance of Washington, which is demanding his arrest
for divulging details of the secret U.S. spy programs.Der
Spiegel said the interview was conducted while Snowden was living in
Hawaii, via encrypted emails with U.S. documentary maker Laura Poitras
and hacker Jacob Appelbaum.Snowden told them that America's closest allies sometimes went even further than the NSA in their zeal for gathering data.The Tempora programme of Britain's GCHQ eavesdropping agency is known in the intelligence world as a "full take"."It
sucks up all information, no matter where it comes from and which laws
are broken," Snowden said. "If you send a data packet and goes through
Britain, we'll get it. If you download anything, and the server is in
Britain, we'll get it."If the NSA
is ordered to target an individual, it virtually take over that person's
data "so the target's computer no longer belongs to him, it more or
less belongs to the U.S. government".(Editing by Philippa Fletcher)

WASHINGTON — In more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation’s
surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency
the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans while pursuing
not only terrorism suspects, but also people possibly involved in
nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks, officials say.

The rulings, some nearly 100 pages long, reveal that the court has taken
on a much more expansive role by regularly assessing broad
constitutional questions and establishing important judicial precedents,
with almost no public scrutiny, according to current and former
officials familiar with the court’s classified decisions.

The 11-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA
court, was once mostly focused on approving case-by-case wiretapping
orders. But since major changes in legislation and greater judicial oversight of intelligence operations were instituted six years ago,
it has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court, serving as the
ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues and delivering opinions that
will most likely shape intelligence practices for years to come, the
officials said.

“We’ve seen a growing body of law from the court,” a former intelligence
official said. “What you have is a common law that develops where the
court is issuing orders involving particular types of surveillance,
particular types of targets.”

In one of the court’s most important decisions, the judges have expanded
the use in terrorism cases of a legal principle known as the “special
needs” doctrine and carved out an exception to the Fourth Amendment’s
requirement of a warrant for searches and seizures, the officials said.